The oil industry is one of the few truly global industries—besides which, it provides a large share of the world’s energy consumption, and also makes the feedstock for the petrochemical industry, which eventually goes into millions of products. The industry has always been segmented along its supply chain into separate upstream, refining, and downstream parts. The value chain optimisation models are commonly leveraged in the leading national oil companies as well as international oil companies to maximise the value of hydrocarbons. There are more opportunities for coordinating activities across a supply chain even in such complex operations as oil and gas, because of improving information systems and communication technologies. Integrating operations management with other functions of the operation allows all functions to be involved in the supply chain management decisions.

Value chain optimisation is well supported by three pillars, as follows:

An organisation model that enhances coordination and captures the value chain optimisation across activities.

Enhance the decision-making process to obtain the maximum and optimum value across operations.

Development of an optimisation tool to perform simulation and analysis, and support decision-making over time.

The value chain optimisation maximises value extraction across various activities, while ensuring energy security and the realisation of overall strategic objectives. The value chain optimisation of flows among assets includes crude production and allocation, refining utilisation and product allocation, gas allocation, refining-petrochemical integration as well as energy balance.

Session overview:

Technology and innovation have played a significant role in shaping the upstream industry, particularly during the latest oil crisis. Companies have invested more in technology development, working collaboratively with partners both inside and outside the industry as well as expanding geographically in search of innovation with the promise of increasing recovery, lowering costs and becoming more efficient throughout the lifecycle of the oil field.

Frontier technology goes beyond the usual research and development department of any company. Frontier technology creates a disruption in the way we conduct the upstream exploration and production and provides oil and gas companies with a platform to springboard a step change in the way the upstream business is run. Frontier technologies could be key innovations like automation, wireless monitoring, 3D printing, remote sensing, airborne surveying, nanotechnology, laser drilling, subsea robotics, machine intelligence, IOT, and augmented reality, to name a few.

In this session, we discuss key topics such as principal drivers and barriers to innovation with frontier technologies, what might be coming our way in terms of major frontier technology and how to adapt to it, and how we would benefit from these types of technologies in the near future in terms of efficiencies, recovery, and cost reduction.